464 



• KNOWLEDGE 



[Dec. IT), II 



over certain plants in which thoy possess a proprietaiy 

 inter«t, and amongst others over those which form the 

 propt>r pasture jjrounds of tlie aphides. Every botanist 

 knows tliat the" interaction between plants and ants is 

 minute and intricato to the most marvellous degree. Some 

 plants attract the ants by nectaries and sweet secretions, to 

 prote»:t them from caterpillars and similar foes ; other plants 

 w»nl them oil" by hairs, moats, rhcvniLr </.■ />i*r, and like 

 liarriers or fortifications, from stealing the honey in their 

 open Bowers. It is easy enough to uuderstanil, therefore, 

 that the aphides may, in the same way, have acquired tlie 

 habit of excreting honey-dew under the inlluence of natural 

 selection, working thi-ough the persons of the ants ; because 

 tliose which possoss«.'d these sweet secretions would thus 

 gain proti-ction for themselves, their eggs, or their food- 

 plants, while those which did not possess them would be 

 left to the tender mercies of an unsympathetic and hungry 

 world. Just as the horse, the cow, and tho dog, have 

 sur>-ived tho extinction of the other large mammals in 

 Europe by their usefulness to men, so certain aphides have 

 sur\-ived the remainder of their kin by their usefulness to 

 the practical-minded ant This was all the more easy for 

 them to elFect, since their whole life is passed in merely 

 sucking juices from the plant which they infest, and they 

 can thus easily afford to spare a little sugar from the 

 abundance of their food-supply, in order to strike a league 

 of permanent friendship with so active and intelligent a 

 force as that of the provident, locomotive, warlike ants. 



LEARNING LANGUAGES. 



By Richard A. Proctor. 



(Continued from page 427.) 



THE plan by which I learned enough of Latin and Greek 

 to read most liooks in these languages with tolerable 

 ease, was an anticipation in some degree of the llamiltonian 

 method, and may be useful to those who find a difficulty in 

 getting Itooks (now out of print) written specially in illus- 

 tration of that method. 



As I have said, I learned Latin and Greek in the usual 

 way at school and college. I gave to them on the scholastic 

 system much more time than I ever did on my own plan ; 

 yet I may almost set on one side altogether all that I so 

 learned alxjut those two languages. I should havi; learned 

 the declensions and conjugations and the elementary rules 

 rca«lily enough (after picking up the general idea of each 

 language) from a lew hours' study later on, with much mon; 

 satisfaction, and, therefore, much more easily than I learned 

 them at school, when as yet I had very little use for them. 

 As for the rules, every schoolboy of tho old Eton Latin 

 <^;rammar days, knows that for any good the J'ropria 

 qii'T mnriliiis did him, in learning what may be called 

 the philosophy of Latin, he might as well have 

 W-n learning Hindoo. He was much more particular 

 to learn the 8e<juence of words than to think of their mean- 

 ing. I am not sure that a boy has learned very much 

 when he »ven knows as a fact that you may term masculine 

 those propjr names which belong to males ; but I know that 

 ninety-nine schoolljoyg out of a hundred (probably the 

 hundredth too) pay no att^-ntion to this fact, important or 

 otherwise, and limit their attention entirely to tho words. 

 Tf. »i.;. ,iny J can repeat rules from the Eton Latin 

 ir, thf meaning of which is altogether new to me, 

 iinple reason that I leamf.-d and have retainrKl the 

 - i i.id have till now never thought of the meaning. I 

 i-tA tolerably sure that if any one had asked mo suddenly 

 when I wa« a l)oy to tell him at>out those four gods men- 



tioned in my Latin rules — "you know the four I mean, my 

 boy ; let me see — m-m-m — Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, 

 Virorum ; tell us about Virorum," — though I should have 

 seen the joke, of course, it would yet have occurred to mo 

 as quite a novel thought that the words I had so glibly by 

 rote, had a meaning, though a useless one for me at the 

 time. I know, and any one who likes to try tho ex- 

 periment with his own boys will find it so, that such 

 rules as I quoted in my last are learned simply 

 by rote. Ask a boy, even a bright one (at the 

 head of his class), what is meant by a deponent verb, 

 not letting him merely quote his grammar definition, but 

 asking him what it means, and the chances are ten thou- 

 sand to ono that ho knows nothing whatever about it. 

 The chances are a good deal more than ten to one that the 

 first educated person you meet — the reader of these linos, 

 perhaps — can tell you nothing to tho purpose about a 

 deponent verb (why it is called deponent, for instance) ; 

 and I doubt if ono in t<'n thousand needs to know or 

 wants to know anything on tho subject. It is not 

 because our school teaching fails to give boys clear 

 ideas about such things that I object to the system ; 

 but because the boy has no use or occasion for any 

 knowledge on such subjects. Teach him the language, 

 and very likely, later on, he may, if philologically in- 

 clined, find great pleasure in studying the philosophy 

 of it ; but don't waste time teaching him what he 

 does not understand, and what would be utterly useless 

 to Iiim if he did. Make him feel how well worth while it 

 is for him to be able to read Latin and Greek, by teaching 

 him to read pleasant and instructive books in those lan- 

 guages. Make him feel that he is getting on — that, as 

 week after week passes, he reads his Latin and Greek more 

 easily. Show him the peculiarities of structure where doing 

 so will help to make his reading come easy to him. If he 

 shows interest in such matters, tell him (but don't make 

 him learn by rote) about those peculiarities and their sig- 

 nificance. But above all, make the tas-k of learning the lan- 

 guage as easy as possible to him ; make it a i)li',asuro to him, if 

 ho is a bright boy — make it as little as possibl(^ of a burden 

 to him if ho is a dull one. Howard rather Jiiui who tries 

 to understand and make progress, than the boy who only 

 cares to learn l)y rote what ho may find in his books. 



I learned almost all I know of Latin and Greek away 

 from school and college, using that abomination to the 

 scholastic mind — literal translations. I would read page 

 after page of Latin — Ciesar, Cicero, Virgil, the "Satires" and 

 "Ar8Poetica"of Horace; in Greek— Herodotus, Xonophon, 

 ITomer, and the like (meaning of like simplicity of con- 

 struction, eschewing for tho time tho more difllcult writers, 

 as Tacitus in Latin and Thucydides in Greek), with the 

 translations ready for constant use. " Tho translations ore 

 abominable " : granted, it is their groat merit. Any one who 

 has the least power of appreciating language, fof^ls that ho 

 ikukI, as quickly as possible, learn to do without their 

 aid. But in the meantime they save the dreary, time- 

 wasting work of turning over dictionaries and lexicons 

 and grammars by giving at onco the proper equivalent of 

 each word and the right moaning (however badly ex- 

 pressed) of each sentence. " But this is an exceedingly 

 lazy way of learning," says the schoolmaster. Awfully 

 lazy, if you take only your thirty or forty lines; but quite 

 the other way if you take ten or twtmty pages. " The 

 memory is not sufljciently exerted." Certainly it is not, if 

 the learner is content to leave it unused ; but if, after 

 reading ten or twenty pages in this way, ho roads them 

 ovrT again in tho original, onco and again, until, without 

 the translation, he can follow tho whole passage as Virgil 

 or Homer wrote it, his memory will be sufficiently exerted. 



